The Brave May Not Live
by Elone McFox
Summary: Cedric and Hermione had four years friendship. This is Hermione's story, as she tells her daughter, thirty years later.


_I've always been a fan of this ship, and this is one thing I found in my computer taht I've written once, and i liked it, and therefore I'm posting it here. If there are reviews, I'll continue and make it something else than a one-shot, which it is now._

Enjoy!

* * *

**The Brave May Not Live**

'What is bothering you?'

I remember him saying those words. The very first words he said to me, actually. It was not exactly his words, but he said them anyway. If anybody had heard him, they would have thought he was being rude, but he was not, it was actually the nicest thing anybody had said to me in weeks.

I was sitting, then, being lonely and twelve years old and actually crying, in the library. People claim, now, that the library would be the safest place for finding me, but they never know the reason. Nobody will ever know. I don't even think he ever knew. He never told me he knew, anyway, but on the other hand, there was a lot I didn't tell him, either, but we both knew that he knew it.

'Mansfield Park?' I asked happily. I could not believe that someone at Hogwarts, a boy from another year and house, had actually read it.

'The very same. But, you're not really my cousin, I suppose. I mean, I'm kind of pure-blooded, so we might...'" He was mumbling about something none of us really cared about, but he made me stop crying, since that was what made him ask me the question in the first time.

'No, my parents are muggles.'

'Well, I don't have any sisters or brothers anyway, so we're not the incarnations of Fanny and Edmund anyway.'

He said those words, the exact way I had put them in my head, which was actually really intimidating, like he had been able to know exactly what I was thinking. I mean, incarnations are the silliest thing someone could ever make up. I mean, they're actually fictional, unlike we were, plus they will always end up marrying each other, which is the worst part of the book. Of course it's good they marry each other, and nobody else, but still... they marry each other.

He had humour, and he had read those books. I had never talked to anyone like him, and I the first time I actually thought that, we had just said those silly words to each other.

'Well, fine. I don't think their destiny is that enchanting anyway. And Fanny is kind of, you know, weird. She gets sick just by walking. Hello?'

'I guess she's some obese American in real life,' he said cheerfully and sat down next to my enormous pile of books.

'Really? Well, maybe that would be the real incarnations of them,' I said and felt that my tears began to dry out, mostly because he gave me a reason to think about anything else than Ron and Harry's utterly ridiculous behaviour.

'Maybe they would. I'm Cedric, by the way. Cedric Diggory.'

I took one of the books he had just in front of him and put it to my left, so I could see him better. I remember that, too, because he helped me with it.

I had seen him before; I knew he was one of these persons that simply everybody loved. I was pretty sure he was a Hufflepuff, two or three years above me.

'Diggory? As in Digory Kirke, you know, in Narnia?' I said. 'I'm, um, I'm Hermione Granger.'

Being addicted to muggle literature really appear to have its points, especially when you were sitting in a school library crying because two persons hated you and nobody else really liked you and then this really cool person came and tried to cheer you up and you wanted that person to stay.

'Oh, that's something mythical, isn't it?' he said. How would he know? Maybe Greek mythology was a big part of the history of magicians through the age, but I had never read about that.

'Yeah. Daughter of Helen of Troy, you know, the most beautiful woman on the planet, which by then actually was flat,' I said, being the usual know-it-all me, but he, unlike how Harry or Ron would have reacted, did not sneer, but just smiled.

'Really? Shouldn't you be, like, really, amazingly beautiful, then?' he said, smiling at what I supposed to be the thought of someone like me – or me specifically - being really beautiful.

'Um-' I said, trying to come up with a really intelligent answer to prove me being really bright, even though I just looked stupid at the moment, with my eyes shining with tears, tears I was shedding because of a really stupid reason I know realised because of him – not that he would know why I cried or why I realise anything.

'I didn't mean it that way! I mean, you aren't disgusting-looking or anything,' he assured me, his face expression changing very quickly.

Not that I cared about being beautiful. I was not that kind of person, mostly because I forced me not to care about my looks, because that would make me think about myself as shallow. Lavender and Parvati were not shallow, they were just girlish, but they would grow up becoming shallow – and it would suit them fine.

'It doesn't matter,' I said with a tiny smile on my lips, because it was actually the first compliment I had ever gotten from a person who was not a friend of my parent's or so. I thought about it as a compliment, even if nobody else would, anyway.

He looked at me and shrugged.

'But you are crying. What has happened? I mean, you do know that it is really easy sending letters. You don't even need post stamps, you only need owls and there are lots of them here, you could even borrow mine.'

I smiled, but shook my head. 'It's not about me sending letters. I've actually sent tons of them to my parents.' A complete lie, but he would never find out anyway.

'What is it then?'

I could not believe that he actually cared about sitting here and listening to me, smiling as I told him everything.

I think about it a lot, but I never try to make it better in my memory. Some of what happened to us was awful, but it made us us, and I would never take it back. From our first words, to our last, I can't regret anything. We met again, while studying or crying or simply reading in the library. The first time I saw him after meeting him in the library, he was walking towards Professor McGonagall's classroom, with a bunch of students following him, all listening to what he had to said; it was so obvious: everybody loves Cedric Diggory. But when he saw me walking in the corridor, he smiled and raised his hand, and nobody questioned him, because they knew that he never did anything wrong.

I remember being so happy that Parvati and Lavender even thought that me, Harry and Ron weren't fighting anymore. It was one week before Harry and Ron came and rescued me from the troll, and after that I didn't see Cedric until the last days before Christmas break.

'I'm trying to figure out some really catchy quote from some old novel', I told him once (or, I'll say as it was: the second time I talked to him in the library).

He looked up and smiled at me. For once he was alone – whenever I had seen him before, he had always been together with some friends, but when he had seen me he had smiled towards me, and not in that small way that nobody could see.

'Really?' he said and laughed. 'I knew I'd find you in here, I was kind of waiting for you, so I guess I will listen to you no matter what quote you say.'

His brown hair didn't look as messy as Harry's, I noticed. He didn't look at me, sometimes, like I was mad, something Ron usually did. Not that I cared about how anybody's hair looked, or how people looked at me – being considered mad by Ron was really something positive, in my opinion, because that would mean that you were so brilliant that people (Ron) didn't get you.

He hurried to clean up the table from books in various topics I wasn't yet old enough to study.

Even though his sentence didn't really mean anything, I knew what he was trying to say.

'How come you're always together with your friends?' I asked him.

'Aren't you, too?' he asked surprised.

'Yeah, but they actually like you, don't they? My friends need me.'

It was true, not some kind of self-pitying. Ron and Harry would never make it without me helping them with their homework, teaching them everything they needed to know but had slept through some teacher's explanation of, and basically everything else.

'I'm not surprised,' he said, half laughing. 'You are the kind of person anyone could get addicted to.'

'What?' I said, not only because I hadn't heard him, I had heard most of it, but also because I couldn't really get what he was talking about, or what those words could ever mean.

'Oh, nothing', he said very quickly and flashed a smile. I was going to learn that those quick smiles were kind of his trademark, not that much later on.

'So, you mean that you're the kind of person who likes going around and saying things to people that you don't really mean, which is a habit that most people – including myself – find really annoying or actually rude?' I said, my voice starting to get high-pitched and very fast. 'Because, honestly, I know that there is a lot of people that consider you to be "popular", which I know includes both you and me, and those people can't – if they're not really stupid, but I'm not going to say that they are, because I hate all these house prejudices – stick with being friends with you if you're being like this.'

He just stared at me for two seconds before trying to match a new facial expression with whatever he was really feeling. 'I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that,' he said.

Yes, Cedric really did have a habit of saying things he didn't really mean. Just as everything I said meant something, he had this habit of either being really quiet – most of the time – and then saying really smart things, or sometimes saying really quick things that he regretted just as quickly.

He was therefore quiet for a time of twenty-three seconds and then spoke, silently and slowly, but still very clearly.

'I think it is a way for people's subconscious mind to say something to another person's subconscious mind. Then I've said something that I meant but wasn't really planning on saying, and you've heard it; you don't know what I said, but you know I meant it and your mind probably knows what I said, too.'

That was what Cedric said; it was his explanation for why he was sometimes so quiet, sometimes so chatty, and sometimes just so curious about me wanting to talk about everything.

Like that other time. I'm not sure about how he even came up with these questions; how he knew that every answer was a small, important part of me.

'What do your parents work with?' (Mine were dentists; his were working with the Ministry.) 'Do you have any siblings?' (No for both of us.) 'Favourite books?' (His was Around the World in 80 days; I didn't know. Of course, by today, if anybody would ask, I would give his answer.)

We covered all that in the few days we had left between the we first started the questioning, which was also the day all the professors stopped with serious classes, and the day most people were going home for winter break.

I'm not really sure why we were talking, but I do know that our questions seemed to make everything else I did then fade away. (You know, very well, about what I was doing then. I was actually in the library looking for information about Nicolas Flamel, and he helped me.)

So, before we both went away for our break, we spent some many days in the library that, he later revealed, his friends thought he had gone mad.

My friends already knew I was mad, of course.


End file.
